It’s the mask sported by anti-capitalist protestors. It is also the mask from the film V For Vendetta:

A shadowy freedom fighter known only as “V” uses guerrilla tactics to fight against his terrorist, totalitarian society. Upon rescuing a girl from the secret police, he also finds his best chance at having an ally.

A cut of every mask sold goes to Warner Brothers. Another cut of every one sold on Amazon goes to Amazon – the company that paid £2.4m in corporate taxes last year, the online retailer’s accounts show, despite making sales of £4.3bn.

The tax bill was almost as much as the £2.5m in government grants Amazon received over the same period, according to a Companies House filing.

So. Buying that mask to wear as a protest against capitalism and corporate greed profits the very companies you dislike.

Rubies Costume Company, whichmakes the mask, sells around 100,000 a year worldwide, and 16,000 in the UK, according to spokesman Steve Kitt, who seems a little concerned that any association with activists might harm the company’s image.

“We sell over 100,000 of these masks a year, and it’s by far the best-selling mask that we sell,” said Howard Beige, executive vice president of Rubie’s Costume, a New York costume company that produces the mask. “In comparison, we usually only sell 5,000 or so of our other masks.” The Vendetta mask, which sells for about $6 at many retailers, is made in Mexico or China, Mr. Beige said.

Mr. Beige said he did not know why the mask was so popular until recently. “We just thought people liked the ‘V for Vendetta’ movie. Then one morning I saw a picture of these protesters wearing the mask in an online news article,” he said. “I quickly showed my sales manager.”

“Hey look everyone, our masks were made in some factory in a developing nation. We are the only hypocrites.” (see here)

And a number of people came out with views similar to Reddit user sayheykid24, who wrote: “How do people think the masks were made? Did they think they were lovingly handcrafted by anti-corporate artisans, or something?”

…

It’s true that Anonymous are not the only hypocrites. But not all hypocrites are entirely dependent on having a moral leg to stand on. Some, like big corporations, have other resources. But punishing other people’s bad behaviour is Anonymous’s recruiting message – join them, they suggest, and you are on the side of the good guys. This means that the group stands and falls on its integrity – and if it can’t afford to play by it’s own rules, it certainly can’t afford to break them.

President Barack Obama told his enthusiastic supporters Monday night that he never promised what video recordings show him promising at least 29 times. The videos show Obama promising 300 million Americans that “if you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan, period.”

PRESIDENT Assad of Syria is a cool guy. His wife is a fragrant “rose in the desert“. On Assad’s Instagram account, we get this photo below of the man, the woman and the child who they are neither molesting nor murdering with toxic gases or bullets. Anyone who says they are is a dirty liar.

“Barack Obama addressed the wide distaste for government… ‘Our campaign from the beginning has been about changing government,’ he said, recalling some great accomplishments of American government: Civil rights legislation, the interstate highway system, and the National Park system. Obama would, he said, ‘transform Washington’ and ‘make government cool again.'”

IN 1907, the Progressive Party campaigned for the London County Council Elections.

It was founded in 1888 by a group of Liberals and leaders of the labour movement. It was also supported by the Fabian Society, and Sidney Webb was one of its councillors. In the first elections of the London County Council (LCC) in January 1889 the Progressive Party won 70 of the 118 seats. It lost power in 1907 to the Municipal Reform Party (a Conservative organisation) under Richard Robinson.

The Westminster Gazette featured this advert from the Party. “Electors, beware of false names and Vote Progressive’,” declared the message.

A council spokesman said: “This is where it gets a bit hazy. Theoretically, Brent Friends of the Earth should let us know…It probably would not happen in Brent because it’s quite a built-up part of northwest London, although there are a lot of parks.”

This is good news for Brent Friends of the Earth, which had used placards and shouting to picket the council’s office. Their spokesperson adds: “I’m trying to remember the source. But I think Edgware was one of the areas being considered, along with Croydon.”

TO Ningguo, a city in Anhui province, China, to see Chinese Communist Party official and deputy mayor Wang Ju meet an elderly constituent. You can see this photo of Wang meeting the 103-year-old Cheng Yanchun in his in-house organ at the Civil Affairs Department, which he is in charge of.

At five months, Franklin was put into short skirts, “as he liked to kick and feel free to move about.” He had cut two teeth by the end of his first summer, but his mother worried that he was “rather too thin, not as fat as a baby ought to be”; he would, in fact, remain remarkably slender until middle age. By November he was trying “to imitate Budgy [Mr. James’s white spitz] and the cats and manages to say a semblance of papa and mama.” That same autumn he was taken to his first adult party on a nearby estate. “Baby wanted to dance,” Sara wrote. “I could hardly hold him.” In May of 1883, Franklin walked unaided for the first time and “was quite proud of his accomplishment.”

Franklin had the bad luck to have been born at the height of the fever of sentimentality kindled in American mothers’ hearts by Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel Little Lord Fauntleroy. In emulation of its precious hero, Franklin’s mother kept him in dresses and long curls until he was nearly six. Then she dressed him in Scottish kilts and highland caps, and finally reluctantly permitted him to wear.

LAST week, the Financial Times revealed a story many missed. Ed Miliband, the Labour Party leader was talking at a “private dinner” for Labour donors at the Phoenix Palace, a smart eatery in London. There, a bowl of soup can set you back £18.

Ed was talking about newspapers and media coverage of his party and his family:

“We’ve got to be willing to call these people out. They are less powerful than people ever thought and they are less powerful now than they were.”

BARACK Obama makes you go weak at the knees. But worry not. Obama is always quick to spot you. He has a microphone. He has water. He stops short of touching the sick to heel them, but chances are he’s just saving that for when someone’s really ill:

AUSTRALIAN Prime Minister Tony Abbott says the NSW bushfires were not linked to climate change. Was it the 11-year-old boys? No. It was the military firing ordnance that started the State Mine fire. But they all said it was global warming. Were those experts wrong? Al Gore says not. He says anyone who says the bushfires aren’t a result of global warming is like a fool who believed smoking wasn’t harmful:

“Well, it’s not my place to get involved in your [Australian] politics, but it reminds me of politicians here in the United States who got a lot of support from the tobacco companies and who argued to the public that there was absolutely no connection between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer...

“For 40 years the tobacco companies were able to persuade pliant politicians within their grip to tell the public what they wanted them to tell them, and for 40 years the tragedy continued.

“And bushfires can occur naturally and do, but the science shows clearly that when the temperature goes up and when the vegetation and soils dry out, then wild fires become more pervasive and more dangerous. That’s not me saying it, that’s what the scientific community says.”

BORIS Johnson, the London Mayor, has been on a student seducing mission to China. We’re flicked through Boris’s photos and can’t help but notice his seating position. He is not demure. He is not refined. He is the big beast. The thighs seem all the more wide apart whenever he’s near George Osborne, the Chancellor.

FUNNY how newspapers work. The Daily Mail called Ralph Miliband “the man who hated Britain”. The paper used the world “evil” in a hatchet job on Ed Miliband’s dad. But when in 2008, high-flyingMail staffer Ted Verity wrote about David Miliband, Ed’s big brother, Ralph got a different billing. (Only two Mail online articles are linked to Verity and both are about his mate David):

First impressions were underlined later that evening when David and I – who were both studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) – went for our first Oxford drink together. We headed for The Turf pub off Holywell Street, a favourite of Hardy’s Jude The Obscure, and I led the way to the bar. ‘I’ll have a half of bitter,’ said David…

But there was something else, too. David, although thoroughly middle-class, was the heir-apparent to a Labour dynasty…

Despite his self-confidence, his academic qualifications were distinctly underwhelming – two grade Bs and a D at A-level. David, it turned out, was one of three Corpus PPE students who had arrived on an Inner London Education Authority scheme to get pupils from the capital’s comprehensives to Oxford. A worthy scheme, no doubt, but it’s hard to imagine that David Miliband was the kind of deprived inner-city pupil the founders had in mind. His father was the eminent Marxist historian Ralph Miliband, whose work loomed large on our syllabus.